Is the day of reckoning for Big Tech finally on the horizon?
According to a report by Axios, insiders expect the U.S. State Department to charge Google with violating antitrust laws as soon as this week in what would be the biggest such action against a tech company in two decades.
The DOJ suit against Google will reportedly focus on monopolistic behavior, although there’s also a possibility the Trump administration will also take action against the company’s blatant anti-conservative bias.
In particular, the case is expected to hone in on allegations of competitive abuses related to search. The DOJ and a group of state attorneys have reportedly also been investigating Google’s advertising business. One proposed remedy being talked about is forcing Google to sell off its Chrome browser, Politico reports.
Although Republicans in particular are taking aim at the search giant for censoring conservative voices, an antitrust case against Google may not necessarily be a strictly partisan one. In a report last week, House Democrats made the case that Google does, in fact, hold a harmful monopoly on search.
In that report, Democrats contended that “the company uses its existing market dominance, control of the Android operating system and financial and technological might to quash competition, thereby denying consumers the benefits of a healthy search market.”
The introduction to the report, which is about 400 pages long, states: “To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.”
“It would be curious to bring a case of this nature, against one of the biggest companies in the world, weeks before an election,” said Doug Gansler, former Democratic attorney general of Maryland and onetime president of the National Association of Attorneys General, now head of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft state attorneys general practice.
One example of the way in which Google is guilty of search bias is in the case of travel searches. Companies such as TripAdvisor have for years complained that Google search results favor the tech company’s own travel services over theirs.
Search bias is also significant because of its effect on the information users consume. Thus, it can play a major role in determining the outcome of an election.
Google, like many of the large tech companies, often censors right-wing political voices. In June, Google banned the website ZeroHedge from its ad platform for two articles that examine Black Lives Matter’s funding. One of the articles was a reprint of a story from The New American.
Around the same time, The Federalist was threatened with having its ad account terminated. The two incidents prompted Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) to ask Attorney General Barr to “add Google to the list of subpoena recipients for the ongoing investigation into election interference, censorship and foreign meddling.”
And Google is just one piece of the Big Tech leviathan that must be reined in.
The power and abuses of the major platforms, and the electoral ramifications of that abuse, was seen this week in the Facebook and Twitter’s suppression of a New York Post report detailing the discovery of e-mails that showed Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden lied when he said he never spoke to his son, Hunter, about the latter’s shady business dealings in Ukraine.
The Post obtained e-mails from a laptop computer that had been owned by Hunter Biden. One of the e-mails was sent to Hunter from Vadym Pozharskyi of the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings. In the e-mail, Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for introducing him to his then-vice president father in a never-before-revealed meeting that occurred just months before Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government into firing the prosecutor investigating Burisma.
Facebook has limited the distribution of this story on social media, according to an announcement made by Facebook spokesman and former Democrat staffer Andy Stone.
Twitter followed Facebook’s lead, censoring links to the New York Post article as “unsafe,” and preventing people — even the newspaper’s own employees — from posting new ones.
Not only should the Tech companies be broken up. At this point, the ideological slant of these corporations makes it clear that they are not the neutral platforms they claim they are, but publishers, just like newspapers are. As such, they should lose their protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which currently protects them from liability for the many things third parties do or say on them.
The globalist Left is more than willing to play hardball in the information war. It’s time constitutionalists and conservatives do the same.
